TIME (OCTOBER 30, 2000 VOL. 156 NO. 17) Give This Guy A Break! ~ Critics have been too hasty in declaring Chen Shui-bian's tenure a failure

TIME (OCTOBER 30, 2000 VOL. 156 NO. 17) Give This Guy A Break! ~ Critics have been too hasty in declaring Chen Shui-bian's tenure a failure

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Give This Guy A Break!

Critics have been too hasty in declaring Chen Shui-bian's tenure a failure

By SIN-MING SHAW

Chinese premier Zhu Rongji once called Chen Shui-bian's presidency a "joke." Outside China, conventional wisdom increasingly seems to agree.

Since Chen's election in March, Taiwan's stock market has plunged by more than 30%, a slide that pundits say represents a vote of "no confidence" in the President's abilities. Chen's approval rating, meanwhile, has fallen to less than 40%, from a high of 77%. His Premier, Tang Fei, resigned after less than half a year in office.

Chen is taking heat for everything. The economy is in the doldrums. A banking crisis is looming as problem loans pile up. The delicate relationship with Beijing has stalled, and no one can control the Vice President, Annette Lu, who pokes China in the eye at every opportunity. (In an official report, Beijing recently called the Taiwan situation "grim.") All of this adds up to a sense that Chen has squandered the promise of his election, an opinion shared, apparently, by his close adviser, Lee Yuan-tseh. A Nobel laureate, Lee said recently that the President "talked too much without giving the people a clear direction where he was going."

So is Chen toast? Is his presidency a disaster? Not at all. The slump in Taiwan stocks has more to do with global worries over the declining earnings of semiconductor companies than with Chen. Taiwan's stock-market index is packed with technology stocks; so is NASDAQ in the U.S., which has also dramatically declined since March. The market is simply saying that if Silicon Valley isn't doing well, neither should Taiwan's tech stocks.

On the political front, it's true that Chen's minority Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has been slow to get up to speed. One reason for that is the Kuomintang(KMT), the DPP's rival, which dominates the legislature and has tended to put partisan interests above those of the nation.